Webinar on the ITS standardisation 1 October 2014: Presentations are available now!

iMobility Support hosted a webinar on 1 October 2014 on ITS Standardisation. 103 ITS Stakeholders attended the webinar. Speakers included Wolfgang Hoefs, from EC DG CONNECT, Knut Evensen from Q-Free, Steve Sill from the US DOT and François Fischer from ERTICO – ITS Europe.

iMobility Support project officer Wolfgang Hoefs, Head of Sector at EC DG CONNECT, opened the webinar happily noting the substantial interest in the webinar. He has also pointed out that ITS Standardisation is an important part, and that importance is also spreading to a wider audience.

Standardisation is one of the tasks of the iMobility Support project and Mr Hoefs referred in this context to the cooperation agreement the EU has signed with ITS America and the US DOT. Wolfgang Hoefs, Head of Sector at EC DG CONNECT has also presented the agenda of the meeting and speakers.

First speaker Knut Evensen provided an update on standardisation process and efforts of ITS standards developing organisations ETSI, CEN and ISO. The overview of for example ETSI shows how wide the area of ITS is involving different transport modes, services and applications, many of which require standards. Mr Evensen referred to the ITS Standards Handbook developed by iMobility that will cover most relevant SDOs and work in the ITS Sector. The next version will be due in November 2014. Presenting some standardisation success stories such as the C-ITS Release 1, Knut Evensen concluded his presentation on an optimistic note. Since the ITS industry is getting closer to deployment, standardisation of applications is becoming a priority. He explained the gaps and overlaps that need to be fixed, more specifically in the area of interoperability and stressed the need for harmonisation.

Next speaker Steve Sill from the US DOT presented a standards and harmonisation status update by the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office – ITS Standards Program. The US DOT is involved in standardisation activities on different levels with an active support inclusive of strategic input, funding and working group participation, in the US based standardisation bodies IEEE and SAE, and oneM2M and ISO on an international level. Moreover, US DOT acts as an observer in and provides strategic cooperation to non-US based bodies such as CEN and ETSI. Mr Sill then elaborated on the many standardisation achievements and work in progress and presented the C-ITS Standards Harmonization, a cooperation initiative between the EC and the US DOT. The initiative now also reaches out to Asia with Japan becoming part of the cooperative structure. Mr Sill provided an update on activities and achievements of the EU-US Harmonization Task Groups (HWG). He explained that future HWG activity may focus on what standards are needed to address all keys interfaces in a complete C-ITS architecture and the cooperative development of future probe data standards in a harmonised way.

Third and final speaker, ERTICO – ITS Europe’s François Fischer reported on the EU project standardisation activity. He presented the standardisation impact and activities for EU projects DRIVE-CX2, Compass4D and HeERO. DRIVE C2X‘s contributions to standardisation include a contribution to ETSI TC ITS WGs based on the DRIVE C2X experiences and the ERTICO/ETSI Plugtests. The Plugtests contributed to validate and refine ETSI TC ITS standards and allowed to verify the interoperability of ITS communication components with non-DRIVE C2X vendors. In the context of Compass4D, the certification activities include the specification of the certification framework needed for wide-scale implementation of piloted applications and technologies across Europe, and even globally. To validate the certification framework, a CMS Plugtest event was organised in cooperation with Compass4D and a certification demo is planned to take place at the ITS World Congress in 2015. For the HeERO project, an eCall Testfest event was organised involving companies from the 3 continents: China, EU, Japan, Korea and USA. 2000 test sessions took place during 350 pairing sessions. This Testfest event included discussions on different ways to implement CEN standards leading to interoperability issues, and provided a proposal for refinements to increase standard readability and consistency. François Fischer continued to explain the Standard Deployment Model developed by ERTICO that provides a framework for the successful development of standards. He concluded that standards ease the deployment and ensure interoperability. However, standards require deployment projects to assess their suitability for use, improve requirements for clarity and consistency and ensure they lead to interoperability. Testfest is the tool to validate and improve standards.

To conclude the webinar, François Fischer stated that some gaps still need to be covered. He noted an improvement in the standardisation process and emphasized the need to welcome harmonisation initiatives. As shown by the presentations during this webinar, François Fischer concluded that standards are suitable for deploying cooperative systems and that the actors must now take care of interoperability.

A lively Q&A session concluded the webinar, with questions covering the status and link with GNSS standards, cooperation with other regions of the world (China) in standardisation and questions related to the future of ITS.